Tag Archives: Australia

The massive floods that swept through Queensland, Australia in 2010/2011 put an area almost twice the size of the United Kingdom under water. And now, a year later, Queensland braces itself for even worse flooding:

More than 35,000 tweets with the hashtag #qldfloods were posted during the height of the flooding (January 10-16, 2011). One of the most active Twitter accounts belonged to the Queensland Police Service Media Unit: @QPSMedia. Tweets from (and to) the Unit were “overwhelmingly focussed on providing situational information and advice” (1). Moreover, tweets between @QPSMedia and followers were “topical and to the point, significantly involving directly affected local residents” (2). @QPSMedia also “introduced innovations such as the #Mythbuster series of tweets, which aimed to intervene in the spread of rumor and disinformation” (3).

On the evening of January 11, @QPSMedia began to post a series of tweets with #Mythbuster in direct response to rumors and misinformation circulating on Twitter. Along with official notices to evacuate, these #Mythbuster tweets were the most widely retweeted @QPSMedia messages.” They were especially successful. Here is a sample: “#mythbuster: Wivenhoe Dam is NOT about to collapse! #qldfloods”; “#mythbuster: There is currently NO fuel shortage in Brisbane. #qldfloods.”

This kind of pro-active intervention reminds me of the #fakesandy hashtag used during Hurricane Sandy and FEMA’s rumor control initiative during Hurricane Sandy. I expect to see greater use of this approach by professional emergency responders in future disasters. There’s no doubt that @QPSMedia will provide this service again with the coming floods and it appears that @QLDonline is already doing so (above tweet). Brisbane’s City Council has also launched this Crowdmap marking latest road closures, flood areas and sandbag locations. Hoping everyone in Queensland stays safe!

Emergency services and media organisations were amongst the most visible participants in #qldfloods, especially also because of the widespread retweeting of their messages.

More than one in every five shared links in the #qldfloods dataset was to an image hosted on one of several image-sharing services; and users overwhelmingly depended on Twitpic and other Twitter-centric image-sharing services to upload and distribute the photographs taken on their smartphones and digital cameras

The tenor of tweets during the latter days of the immediate crisis shifted more strongly towards organising volunteering and fundraising efforts: tweets containing situational information and advice, and news media and multimedia links were retweeted disproportionately often.

This study (PDF) analyzes the community of Twitter users who disseminated information during the crisis caused by the Australian floods in 2010-2011. “In times of mass emergencies, a phenomenon known as collective behavior becomes apparent. It consists of socio-behaviors that include intensified information search and information contagion.” The purpose of the Australian floods analysis is to reveal interesting patterns and features of this online community using social network analysis (SNA).

The authors analyzed 7,500 flood-related tweets to understand which users did the tweeting and retweeting. This was done to create nodes and links for SNA, which was able to “identify influential members of the online communities that emerged during the Queensland, NSW and Victorian floods as well as identify important resources being referred to. The most active community was in Queensland, possibly induced by the fact that the floods were orders of mag-nitude greater than in NSW and Victoria.”

The analysis also confirmed “the active part taken by local authorities, namely Queensland Police, government officials and volunteers. On the other hand, there was not much activity from local authorities in the NSW and Victorian floods prompting for the greater use of social media by the authorities concerned. As far as the online resources suggested by users are concerned, no sensible conclusion can be drawn as important ones identified were more of a general nature rather than critical information. This might be comprehensible as it was past the impact stage in the Queensland floods and participation was at much lower levels in the NSW and Victorian floods.”

Social Network Analysis is an under-utilized methodology for the analysis of communication flows during humanitarian crises. Understanding the topology of a social network is key to information diffusion. Think of this as a virus infecting a network. If we want to “infect” a social network with important crisis information as quickly and fully as possible, understanding the network’ topology is a requirement as is, therefore, social network analysis.

As many as 400 fires were identified in Victoria on February 7, 2010. These resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire; 173 people were killed and over 400 injured. This analysis of 1,684 tweets generated during these fires found that they were “laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes.”

Of the 705 unique users who exchanged tweets during the fires, only two could be considered “official sources of communication”; both accounts were held by ABC Radio Melbourne. “This demonstrates the lack of state or government based initiatives to use social media tools for official communication purposes. Perhaps the growth in Twitter usage for political campaigns will force policy makers to reconsider.” In any event, about 65% of the tweets had “factual details,” i.e., “more than three of every five tweets had useful information.” In addition, “Almost 22% of the tweets had geographical data thus identifying location of the incident which is critical in crisis reporting.” Around 7% of the tweets were see-king information, help or answers. Finally, close to 5% (about 80 tweets) were “directly actionable.”

While 5% is obviously low, there’s no reason why this figure has to remain this low. If humanitarian organizations were to create demand for posting actionable information on Twitter, this would likely increase the supply of more actionable content. Take for example the pro-active role taken by the Philippines Govern-ment vis-a-vis the use of Twitter for disaster response. In any case, the findings from the above study do reveal that 65% of tweets had useful information. Surely contacting the publishers of those tweets could produce even more directly actionable content—which is why the BBC’s User-Generated Content Hub (UGC) uses follow-up as strategy to verify content posted on social media.

Finally, keep in mind that calls to emergency numbers like “911” in the US and “000” in Australia are not spontaneously actionable. That is, human operators who handle these emergency calls ask a series of detailed questions in order to turn the information into structured, actionable content. Some of these standard questions are: What is your emergency? What is your current location? What is your phone number? What is happening? When did the incident occur? Are there injuries? etc. In other words, without being prompted with specific questions, callers are unlikely to provide as much actionable information. The same is true for the use of twitter in crisis response.